The voters of Pierce County used Ranked Choice Voting to elect their County Executive, County Council and other county level officers in 2008. This site discusses the Ranked Choice Voting races in Pierce County as well as other jurisdictions considering RCV around the state of Washington.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Dick Muri: No on Repeal

In the comments below, County Councilmember Dick Muri describes why he voted No on putting the repeal of Ranked Choice Voting on the ballot again.

Interestingly, Instant Run Off Voting is actually the base methodology used by the political parties to decide delegates, county chairs, state chairs and national chairs. The parties use Run-off Voting because they have a manageable amount of voters (less than 1,000). The parties do consecutive multiple elections with criteria on eliminating those who do not receive enough votes to be in contention. Thus if your first choice is eliminated, you can then vote for second choice then third choice, etc. The thus do multiple elections in one afternoon and eliminate people along the way. So it is the method of choice among the political parties to get a consensus candidate and not have a spoiler effect, so it’s interesting that the preferred method is now our method, and I think we should keep it.

It is my opinion, 2008 IRV/RCV went well except for a few needed areas of improvement. County auditor counting procedures because of software and computing power requirements and other small things that have now been improved and will allow for, hopefully, daily reporting of the results. And we did have some problems at the polling places due to large turnout—a few less polling places, and now where we live, the new federal law allows the military to register to vote, and vote on the day of the election—and literally, I think there was close to 1,000 people who registered that day and voted that day, and that also made a lot more work for the polling sites because those were all provisional ballots.

Then the other question is – the Top-2 Primary—because people are saying we like the Top-2 Primary, well that’s still in doubt. There’s still lawsuits and negotiations going on and it’s interesting that it might be resolved before this November election and we might see that we have Pick-a-Party Primary again, and then people may, if this charter amendment proposal does pass today, they’ll hopefully be voting ‘no’ on Charter Amendment number 3.

Also, to answer Mr. Paulson’s question about the cost of the election, there is already going to be a County-wide ballot in November because we do have two other charter amendments that have already been approved.

I plan to vote no on this Charter Amendment because I think it’s a good system, and I’d like to see it get one more shot at it and see how it works. If it doesn’t work this November, then I’ll be right with you all in 2010 to put this amendment on the ballot.